Safe
by akblake
Summary: A bit of friendship, and trust, between our favorite hitter and thief. Can be read as pre-romance if you squint and tip your head in the right direction.


Obviously not mine, even though I'm having fun playing with them (and still hold a forlorn hope that the series finale is a con on the audience). I ship Parker/Eliot, though this can be taken as purely friendship or as the beginning of something more :) As always- love reviews and feel free to PM me if I've made any massive errors!

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Eliot sat on the floor meditating while, thirty feet above him, Parker did her own version of meditation. She'd outfitted her new Portland warehouse with a tangle of steel bars, varying thicknesses, metals, placements, and angles. She had worked hard on it for months and today was the big test- will her modifications hold, or will they send her crashing to the ground?

"You still good up there?" floated up to her ears, making her smile as she crouched on one of the highest bars. Eliot had made her promise, years ago, that she would have him standing by any time she tested out new equipment or harness alterations; the team's hitter wasn't just her protector on the job, but also tried to be there to catch her any time she may need him. That level of care, and the trust she felt for him in return, was still such a new experience that her tummy got butterflies when she thought about it.

"Yep," Parker sang out, "Just planning the best route down!" That drew his attention, and Eliot looked up in time to watch her step off the bar. She fell a second and then whipped her hands out to catch a thin bar, set at an angle from the one she just left. Swinging off of it tossed her in another direction and she joyfully went with the momentum. Eliot felt like he was watching a human pinball as the crazy but undeniably graceful thief swung from bar to bar, sometimes falling an alarming distance before bouncing and swinging back up again. The massive grin on her face was easily visible even from where he knelt on the floor. He had a small grin in response as he marked her progress up, down, and around, seeming to defy gravity with every twist and flip.

One pole shifted as her foot landed on it, Parker intending to spring off of it to reach the perpendicular iron bar seven foot above it and she slipped. "Parker!" Eliot sprang up, immediately calculating her speed and trajectory, and knew that the fall would be a bad one for them both. He still was in the process of moving under her, ready to break her fall, when she twisted like a cat and scrambled to grab onto a structural support which held up her twisted version of monkey bars. After slipping a few tense seconds, her hold stopped her momentum and they both froze, breathing heavily. Parker took a moment and then made her way back down to the ground where Eliot met her, automatically looking her over for any injuries. "You good?" he asked, trying to hold onto calm despite his racing heart and adrenaline.

"Yeah, I'm good. I'm good," she repeated, reassuring herself too. "One of the anchoring bolts on the pole mount must be defective. It didn't move the last two times I landed on it, so it either loosened, which it wasn't supposed to do, or it stripped the threads…" Parker was still pale, and talking too fast, so Eliot stepped closer, giving her the choice. He couldn't force her to accept comfort, but he could offer it if she needed it. She abruptly quit talking and immediately grabbed him for a quick hug before stepping back. One deep breath later and Parker appeared far less shaken-up than she did before. She flashed him a grin of thanks before turning to walk further into her living space, leaving a very puzzled hitter behind to deal with the fading remnants of his own fright.

She returned a moment later, holding her own custom harness and a spare which she offered to Eliot. "Want to go freak out some museum curators?" The manic look was back in her eye and her smile grew when he simply raised his eyebrows at her, face expectant. "I found my thing."

Eliot waited a second for her to elaborate, but in typical Parker fashion she seemed to expect him to already know what she meant. "What _thing_, Parker?" he ran his hands through his hair in confused aggravation as he attempted to keep his temper. No one could wind him up faster than Parker. Granted, Hardison usually hit his buttons in four words or less, but it just wasn't the same feeling.

"Like how your thing is cooking," Parker attempted to clarify, cocking her head to study him, "I found my thing. I break into museums and switch the exhibits around, rearrange the dioramas," she broke off to laugh. "It's always funny to watch them freak out when I switch the Greek artifacts with the Egyptian, or shuffle the Rembrants, Monets, and Picassos. The curator in the Bowman wing still hasn't figured out that I switched their Rubens and Ruisdael!"

Eliot had to laugh too, her joy proving infectious. He took the offered harness and buried his own dislike of dangling off the end of a rope. Whether protecting her from a mark's goons or even from her own rattled nerves, he would always be her safety. Parker loosed a whoop, grabbed his hand, and pulled him out of her warehouse. They had a museum to break into!


End file.
